Zelienople, out of Chicago, has been making drone-y, atmospheric music for ten years, following collaborations with Souled American’s Scott Tuma and others. In his review of Hold You Up, Tim Clarke observed, “The foundations are always shifting, creating the waves that give these songs their uneasy, melancholic sway.” Here guitarist/vocalist Matt Christensen and drummer Mike Weis list some influences—musical and otherwise—that shape their work.
Matt Christensen:
Popul Vuh—Agape-Agape (Love-Love)
Favorite records change over time, but this one has stayed with me the longest, so I guess I might have to say it’s my favorite record. At this point, I’ve been alive and with this one long enough to be able to say that. There are so many things about this record that I emulate, but half the time I’m not trying to steal anything but the headspace it creates. The record also sounds like it was recorded direct to cassette tape, and I love it.
The Master, Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
This might be my favorite film of all time. I once read an interview with the 2 guys from the band America, and they said that one person wrote about the indoors, and the other about the outdoors. I mostly write about people, so I would maybe be an indoor person. I feel that this movie is perfection. I don’t like to use the word “amazing” unless it’s warranted, but Joaquin Phoenix is amazing in this. The acting, tone, look, sound, and overwhelming complexity of the characters is amazing.
The Les Paul Jr.
I never really connected with guitar for a long time. I started out on bass and didn’t even play guitar live until after our 3rd record (Ink) was released. I then switched to a Telecaster (that blue one on the right is a Tele that I converted to an Esquire). I then played Teles live and on all of our records up until “Show Us The Fire”, when I switched to an LP Jr through a ’74 Fender Pro Reverb amp (no pedals!). I fell in love with this guitar. The simplicity, it’s almost piano-like sound, and the way I feel connected to it hasn’t gotten old. I really love this guitar.
My music room
My favorite place in the world. Clean, bright, minimal. Saturdays are my alone/ music days. I’m always working on recordings, and I will lay on the couch (just out of frame, at the bottom), and listen to what I/ we’ve done, on a loop. If I can fall asleep while listening, that’s a good sign.
My girl, 13
My favorite person in the world. I took this picture after we had been cooped-up for 2 straight days. We walked the mile down to the Chicago Lakefront to play volleyball. It was 55 degrees out, so all of the self-isolating people were out, and the streets and beach were more crowded than usual. With the pandemic in its 2nd week (for the U.S.) I would sometimes imagine it being just the two of us surviving in a post-apocalyptic world, and that didn’t seem like the most horrible thing.
Mike Weis:
During this period of isolation, uncertainty, anxiety and just feeling a bit bat-shit crazy as a result of being a working parent during this global pandemic I’ve found that what I crave the most right now is spaciousness. For weeks I’ve been voraciously consuming information, breaking news and first-hand feature stories concerning the Coronavirus. This overdosing on media was starting to get to me so I decided to decrease my clicking, scrolling and tuning-in to a manageable limit and using the breaks for more empty space. We are fortunate that our family are able to “shelter in place” in the woods of northwest Indiana at my wife’s parent’s house. I’ve turned to nature for relief since this thing happened and it’s become my raft. I spend most of my free time in the woods, just listening to the sounds of wilderness waking up from Winter. However, as a “billboard photographer”, I need to be on the roads for a few hours every weekday. When I’m not tuning into my book on CD (The Overstory) I’m finding that the only music that doesn’t make me feel claustrophobic is stuff that is non-narrative, non-linear, without subject and is chock full of a good chunk of emptiness. As John Cage says, “there’s too much there, there” So this list is all about the father of this kind of music... John Cage.
John Cage— 4'33"
Of course! This “composition” has probably had the most influence on my mid-life years. Cage’s idea of listening indiscriminately to the everyday sounds of our surroundings has been a radical shift in how I perceive the world around me. When I tune in like this, immediately I feel an expansiveness that “lifts my feet off the ground.” “The wisest thing to do is to open one’s ears immediately and hear a sound suddenly before one’s thinking has a chance to turn it into something logical, abstract, or symbolical. Sounds are sounds and men are men, but now our feet are a little off the ground.”—John Cage
John Cage—Branches
Ideas must have flowed ceaselessly out of Cage’s head because this one is pretty nuts and it seems ridiculous on paper. “The instruments to be used are amplified pods, cacti, and other plant materials, such as pod rattles from a Poinciana tree, which Cage specifically mentions in the score. Other instruments are to be selected by the performers, using I-Ching chance operations. Cacti are played by plucking needles with toothpicks, amplifying their sounds via cartridge-like attachments.” I love the idea of using plant material as sound generators. Whenever I walk in wilderness I’m constantly looking for things to create sounds with on my hike. During this pandemic shut-in period I’ve been recording rhythms in the woods using sticks, trees, seed-pods, water, etc. and then sending them to Matt and Brian to be formed into Zelienople songs.
John Cage—Ryoanji
The first time I heard this piece I absolutely fell in love with the sounds before I even knew it was inspired by the beautiful rock garden at Ryoanji Zen Buddhist temple in Kyoto, a place that I fell in love with during a visit a few years earlier. I like that the score instructs the performers to “play in ‘Korean unison,’ their attacks being close, but not exactly together.” These parts are a series of quarter notes (as in the percussion part), which (different for each instrument) are to be played slightly before, slightly after, or more or less on the beat. So many of my favorite things coming together in one piece of music, it feels like it was written specifically for my ears!
John Cage—Imaginary Landscape no. 1
1939! This piece was composed in 1939! Holy shit, it sounds radical even by today’s standards. Most likely the first electro-acoustic piece ever composed. Pretty sure most of my solo work can be traced back to the influence that this short piece had on me.
John Cage—Fourteen
This is from Cage’s later period,1990, composed less than two years before his death. It’s a really beautiful piece of soft, resonant tones made mostly by bowing objects. You Ambient kids out there should dig this one.
Long-standing Chicago trio Zelienople don’t so much take you on a journey as add weight to the air around you. This is grayscale music, waterlogged and grainy. Their new album, Hold You Up, wastes no time establishing its mood, “Safer” dropping the listener straight into Zelienople’s foggy, incandescent flow, Mike Weis’s ride cymbal racing like an anxious pulse, woody snare hits like someone knocking on the side of a coffin. Matt Christensen’s main lyrical message, “I’m safer taking care of you,” feels like one of hope — or perhaps co-dependence.
“Breathe” is suffocatingly claustrophobic, sparse cymbal strikes hissing like steam escaping from a fissure. The song’s metallic sheen of reverb casts a sinister halo around the looped piano and snatches of vocal, Christensen’s guitar jutting into the spaces around the other instruments. As the track fades out, the listener is left with two rhetorical questions: “What would I do without you? What would you do without me?” There’s no resolution. The eight-minute title track is animated by brushed cymbals, murky guitar arpeggios, and an insistent kick-drum pulse that brings to mind the ambient techno of Gas. Halfway through, the song springs to life when the vocals first interject, as though Christensen has nodded off during the hypnotic introduction, then woken up and remembered he needs to sing.
“You Have It” is propelled by a tight, shuffling groove from Weis, above which Christensen’s plucked guitar reverberates beautifully. “Just An Unkind Time” brings bassist Brian Harding to the fore, which makes for a welcome shift, as his contributions up to this point are hard to discern. Harding also brings the melodic thread to closer “America,” where the interplay between the rhythmic loop in the background and the instrumental tapestry woven in the foreground is alternately hypnotic and destabilising. Just as you think you’ve worked out the way the timing works, it seems to slip out of sync.
That feels like an apt summary of Hold You Up as a whole: the foundations are always shifting, creating the waves that give these songs their uneasy, melancholic sway. Though it’s meditative, it’s far from restful — it’s acutely conscious of the thorn in its side, the lump in its throat, the deep ache in its heart.
@s_mike_bmx sending it over the fence during the @keystoned_crew Corn-Crete Roast at Zelienople Skatepark yesterday afternoon. via: @grindworks_bmx #ridepabmx #bmx #pennsylvania #pittsburgh #zelienople #zelienopleskatepark #keystonedcrew #keystoned #grindworksbmx #bitchcranksanonymous (at Zelienople Community Park) https://www.instagram.com/p/CPNwWVfHElJ/?utm_medium=tumblr
